The Odyssey

There are two types of films that it is easy to write about: the very good and the very bad.  Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey is both easy and difficult to write about. Easy, because the film has a clear and deliberate argument about Homer’s epic and its meaning in the modern world, and difficult because of that argument.  Rather than simply recreate the well-known episodes of Odysseus’ journey, Nolan choses to engage with them at their core, challenging the story’s assumptions, and asking what it means to a contemporary audience.  It is a complete recontextualization of one of Western literature’s foundational works and one that can only be described as modern.

In the classical telling of The Odyssey, Odysseus is the exemplar of a heroic character.  A warrior tested by forces beyond his control, placed before him by gods, enemies, and fate starting with the great walls of Troy themselves.  After breaking them down with is legendary strategy Odysseus is bedeviled at every step on his voyage home by monsters, witches and the seas themselves.  Each, from a giant Cyclops to a cliff dwelling monster and the call of the Sirens, he is able to best but still is waylaid twenty years trying to return home only to find his ancestral land overrun with greedy suitors attempting to steal his wife (Hathaway) and kill his son (Holland).  By confronting each, like Hercules at his labors, he reaffirms himself a hero.

Or at least, he used to.  Nolan’s interpretation turns that idea inside out. Rather than seeing Odysseus’s trials as proof of his heroism, the film presents them as the consequences of his actions. His journey is not simply a punishment imposed by the gods, but a confrontation with his own role in the violence and destruction that shaped his life.  Nolan’s Odyssey suggests that the heroic stories civilizations tell about themselves often preserve the victories while erasing the cost. Odysseus has spent years carrying a legend of his own greatness, one which old comrades like King Menelaus (Bernthal) still speak about at feasts years after, but the journey home forces him to confront what that legend leaves out.  The man who entered Troy through deception and violence must eventually reckon with a world where mercy and human connection matter more than conquest.

There is also the hint that Nolan himself, for all his work in the superhero space, has issues with handling mythology (not lore but the underpinnings of the fantastic).  His filmmaking language has often been built around physical systems and frequently find drama in mechanisms, the interaction of structures and carefully designed environments. Witness the exact neatness of the world folding on itself in Inception or moving backwards in Tenet.  Odysseus’s world, by contrast, is far more elemental; one not of machines but oceans, islands, deserts and vast empty horizons.  Although defiantly contrasting Odysseus and his loneliness against it, it also suggests his unease with the truly mythical and preference to show literal nothingness over the fantastic.  The supernatural elements of The Odyssey are often treated less as concrete realities and more as experiences filtered through memory, storytelling, and perception. Nolan keeps the magical, like the cyclops Polyphemus or the spells of the witch Circe, distant, obscured, or partially hidden.

Perhaps because of this, the film feels most assured when it returns to Ithaca and focuses on human conflicts. The struggles between Telemachus, Penelope, and the increasingly aggressive suitors are not about monsters or gods, but power, memory, absence, and the consequences of choices.  Ultimately, The Odyssey is not Nolan attempting to preserve Homer’s epic in its original form. It is Nolan asking what the story means now and that is why it may endure. A straightforward attempt at a “definitive” adaptation might preserve the original story but risk becoming tied to its own moment. This new version instead creates a conversation with Homer, one that future audiences can continue to revisit and reinterpret themselves.

8.5 out of 10

Starring Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Zendaya, Charlize Theron, Samantha Morton, John Leguizamo and Jon Bernthal. Directed by Christopher Nolan.

Moana

The old saying is ‘you can’t go home again.’  Not just because it has changed from remembrance, if not been lost to time entirely, but because we’re not the same individuals who left it.  It exists purely as the thing we remember, a fact reality is always a poor comparison to and which we are often inevitably let down by.  That doesn’t stop us from continually wanting to, however, or continually trying.  Moana certainly wants to, both the film and its central character played by newcomer Catherine Laga’aia.

Just like the original from ten years ago, Moana dreams of a time before her tribe settled on its ocean home, when they sailed from island to island as wave born hunter-gatherers.  She sees their transition to a settled agricultural society as literal death in the form of pestilence and plague and, despite her father’s (Tui) best wishes, rush out to sea to find the demigod Maui (Johnson) and calm the ancient sea demon which attacks her people whenever they set out on the water.  And, perhaps in the process, she will find her own sense of identity as her people’s future leader and embrace it rather than run from it.

It was a straightforward and engaging story when it was first told and it essentially still is.  In many ways less adaptation than recreation, it often repeats scenes and compositions almost exactly as they were in the original.  More than that, it understands the strengths of the first film and lives by the motto of not fixing unbroken things.  Lin-Manuel Miranda’s songs provide the same emotional energy and memorability they had before and the story still works as a construction for Laga’aia’s sincerity and confidence.  She carries the film with the same sense of curiosity and determination that defined her animated counterpart.  Dwayne Johnson’s return as Maui is more of a mixed blessing. His personality remains naturally suited to the character, but Maui also demonstrates what is lost when animated characters are translated into a more realistic world. Animation allowed the character to be exaggerated into a true mythological figure. His size, movement, and expressions could reflect his status as a demigod. In live action, even with visual effects, he is limited by the physicality of a real performer. As larger than life as Johnson is, what worked so well in animation seems diminished when placed within the constraints of reality.

Moreso, by copying the original so exactly it takes on its strengths as much as its weaknesses.  On the surface, Moana appears to be about rejecting outdated traditions and embracing the future. Moana sees her island struggling because her people have become trapped by fear and isolation. She leaves to discover a better path, but her solution is not actually a new one. She learns her ancestors were once great voyagers who traveled across the ocean and dreams of going back to that time, intimating progress coming not from invention, but from remembering what was forgotten.  While stories often look back to a lost golden age, a time when humanity possessed wisdom it has since lost, human advancement has generally come through adaptation and innovation rather than restoration.  The past can provide lessons, but the future is rarely created by simply returning to what once was.

That tension creates the greatest missed opportunity of the live-action Moana. A remake could have challenged its own assumptions by exploring whether returning to ancestral ways is truly progress, whether the past can ever be recovered, or whether each generation must create something beyond what came before.  Instead, the film itself becomes an example of the very thing its story questions. It does not explore new territory; it retraces a familiar journey. The audience receives nearly the same story, the same emotional beats, and many of the same images, but without the sense of discovery that made the original special.  It’s a problem that has bedeviled most of the Disney live action remakes.  They gain much from the originals because they preserve the elements that worked while adding in detail and precision, but in the process they lose the charm that made the animated films unique.  The added realism and visual detail cannot replace the expressive freedom, stylization, and emotional immediacy of animation.

The end result, though not a travesty by any means, is often less than the sum of its parts.  It never takes that final step. It finds the same island, follows the same voyage, and reaches the same conclusion. It is a technically impressive recreation of a journey audiences have already taken, but it never discovers a new horizon of its own.

6.5 out of 10

Starring Catherine Laga’aia, Dwayne Johnson, John Tui, Frankie Adams, Rena Owen, Gerald Ramsey and Awhimai Fraser. Directed by Thomas Kail.

The Invite

There is, we keep hearing, a dearth of adult-oriented films coming from Hollywood.  A focus on kid’s films, animation and four quadrant blockbusters has sucked up all of the resources and creativity of the studio system, leaving little behind to compete with the kinds of films we used to make.  Such was said in the 80s as New Hollywood ground to a halt, and in the 90s and 2000s as well, and no doubt will be in the future when looking back at the 2020s.  But it’s also impossible to avoid the feeling that adult-oriented comedies like The Invite are thinner on the ground than they used to be, enough to feel refreshing even as it reminds of better films, and lenient even when it veers to shallowness.  Drawing inspriration from everything from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice to Judd Apatow movies, Olivia Wilde’s adaptation of Cesc Gay’s play blends its influences into something both familiar and contemporary.  It never quite shakes those influences, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

The invite in question is to Hawk and Piña (Norton and Cruz), the new couple in a toney San Francisco apartment building who have caught the eye of homemaker Angela (Wilde) and the ire of her husband Joe (Rogen). Angela, feeling shut in and unfulfilled as a stay-at-home mom, has picked the new neighbors as a way of bringing herself out of her funk by inviting them to the sort of upscale adult dinner party she wishes she threw, but doesn’t.  She’s also picked them, whether she realizes it or not, because Joe can’t stand anything new or which breaks into his carefully built bubble of comfort at home and they do both, particularly with the sounds of the energetic and frequent lovemaking coming through the walls.  Inviting them behind Joe’s back, Angela must combat his stubborn refusal to take part and the gradual unraveling of her preparations (including a lack of food and drink) amid escalating tension.  Neither of which leaves them at all ready when the happy couple actually knocks on the door.

Like a good stage play (and it is obvious The Invite was one if you weren’t aware at the outset), Wilde’s film understands the value of anticipation. Nearly half its running time is spent preparing for Hawk, a retired firefighter, and Piña, a clinical sex therapist. Their entrance is built through conversation and expectation before they finally appear, at which point the film subtly changes gears, marital sniping giving way to passive aggression, curiosity, and eventually genuine self-examination. Wilde's gift for comic timing, memorably displayed in Booksmart, is back at the fore, keeping what could have become a claustrophobic, stage-bound exercise lively and cinematic. Conversations swirl from room to room, alliances shift, and the dynamics between the four characters continually evolve. The story steadily moves toward what ultimately feels like its only logical conclusion, but it reaches that destination through a series of detours, reversals, and surprising emotional.

At the core of it is Joe himself, displaying Rogen’s increasing strength with drama.  His grumpiness and internal disappointment with life have manifested as chronic back pain and emerges regularly through sarcastic remarks and emotional withdrawal rather than honest engagement.  A momentarily successful pop musician, his life instead has veered into the steady middle class where he works as a music schoolteacher and drowns himself in regrets on things that didn’t work out.  It leaves all his conversations with Angela to dissolve into the kind of petty bickering and accumulated resentment that anyone who has spent time around a couple on the verge of divorce will immediately recognize for no other reason than she is the best available target.  He’s not just the source of most amusement but the wounded soul most of drama and pathos The Invite can generate derives from.

The shift comes when the neighbors reveal the true purpose of their visit: to invite their new friends to the occasional group sex they have been taking part in for some time, the new way they approach intimacy with friends and neighbors wherever they live.  What could become broad farce, and almost does, instead opens the door to unexpectedly thoughtful conversations about honesty, desire, insecurity, and the compromises people make within long-term relationships.  It’s not without flaws. There are moments where the dialogue feels clunky, and even an actor as naturally charismatic as Seth Rogen struggles to make such a deeply unpleasant character consistently compelling. At times, his bitterness threatens to overwhelm the audience's sympathy.

Even so, The Invite’s wit, emotional intelligence, and willingness to continually surprise more than compensate. Beneath its provocative premise lies a compassionate observation about relationships, that the end of a marriage is not necessarily the end of love, nor even an ending in an absolute sense. Sometimes relationships simply transform into something new, and every ending contains the possibility of another beginning. That idea gives The Invite a warmth that lingers long after the credits roll and, just as importantly, reminds us why films like this matter. The Invite is exactly the sort of thoughtful, funny, conversation-driven movie people claim they want more of. If we truly do, then supporting films like this is the only way to ensure they continue to be made.

Rating 7.5 out of 10

Starring Seth Rogen, Olivia Wilde, Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz. Directed by Olivia Wilde.

Supergirl

An unfortunate mix of some of the worst instincts of modern big budget filmmaking and some truly inspired casting offering promise for the future, Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl is an occasionally compelling entry in the latest version of DC films.  Anchored by an excellent performance from Milly Alcock, it presents a vision of Kadddra Zor-El defined by grief, cynicism and dislocation which may not necessarily be everyone’s ideal for a fun summer superhero film.  Built in intentional contrast to Superman – isolated instead of surrounded by humanity, longing for her past rather than her future, cynical instead of hopeful – it’s dour film which asks much of Alcock to retain interest, perhaps more than is possible or even fair.  And still, even at its end, in search of its own identity.

Rather than surviving the destruction of Krypton itself, Kara Zor-El was born in a floating city after the planets end.  When the means of her people’s salvation turns against them in the form of deadly radiation poisoning Kara is sent to Earth to live with her cousin Kal-El, better known as Superman.  Unable to handle the pain of loss and unwilling to follow her cousin’s course into superheroics, Kara bounces around outer space where she can dampen her powers to drink herself and her loneliness into a stupor.  In the middle of one such bender to bounces into angst-ridden orphan Ruthye (Ridley) on a quest to revenge herself against the Brigand (Schoenaerts) who murdered her family.  When Krem poisons her beloved dog Krypto, Kara finds herself dragged into the quest, trying to save her dog from death and Ruthye from a fate worse than death.

It’s the kind of set up which could deliver an interesting take on the classic superhero staple but requires a lot of goodwill on its audiences’ part, goodwill for which not enough has yet been done.  Some of that comes from casting Kara as a reluctant hero full of bad habits, a literal dichotomy to Superman leaving her more defined by what she isn’t than what she is.  It takes a lot of screen charisma to make that work and though Alcock puts her all into Kara, the film she’s in isn’t always up to the challenge.  Gillespie attempts to cover for this by relying heavily on familiar superhero storytelling devices, from slow motion rock song needle drops to a Lone Wolf and Cub dynamic designed for emotional manipulation.  The Kara / Ruthye is intended to provide emotional contrast and reflection, allowing the film to externalize Kara’s internal struggle through her relationship with a young girl on a revenge-driven path. In practice it never really comes alive, feeling more like a structural obligation than a relationship that organically deepens either character, leaving Supergirl’s thematic intent clearer than its emotional impact.

It’s just as muddled visually as it’s story.  Much of the setting is confined to indistinct alien worlds and environments rendered in familiar shades of muted brown and metallic gray. Rather than embracing the strangeness the way executive producer and DCU mastermind James Gunn did in his Guardians of the Galaxy films, Gillespie settles into a relatively generic visual language that flattens its sense of place. This lack of distinctiveness becomes more noticeable as Supergirl goes along, contributing to a feeling of tonal uniformity rather than discovery.  The characters are in frequently the same space, the antagonists functioning primarily as placeholders for cruelty, defined by familiar villainous acts without meaningful individuality or motivation.  Schoenaerts Krem is constructed as an overly sadistic figure threatening through intensity alone but the performance and writing never coalesce into something memorable.

Gillespie and writer Ana Nogueira seem aware enough of that to immediately start looking for band aids, notably in the form of Momoa’s fan favorite character Lobo being brought to the screen for the first primarily because he is a fan favorite.  Like Ryan Reynolds’ approach to Deadpool, there is a sense of total alignment between actor and role, as though the character has finally found the right vessel. In isolation, Lobo is one of the film’s more engaging elements. Within the narrative itself he feels like an interruption rather than an integration. The story does not need him and he is left to function like a preview of future projects rather than a necessary part of the present one.

What ultimately emerges is a film that is consistently watchable but rarely distinctive. It is buoyed by a strong central performance and occasional flashes of thematic interest, but undermined by structural inconsistency, an underdeveloped villain, and a persistent sense that its most compelling ideas remain underexplored. Supergirl is not a failure, but it is also not yet a fully realized vision. It exists in an in-between state: competent, occasionally engaging, and ultimately searching for a stronger film to support the character at its center.

6.5 out of 10

Starring Milly Alcock, Eve Ridley, Matthias Schoenaerts, Jason Momoa, David Krumholts, Emily Beecham and David Corenswet. Directed by Craig Gillespie.

The Furious

Visceral, fast-moving and filled to the edges with balletic choreography, Kenji Tanigaki’s The Furious is almost everything you could want from a kung fu movie, even if it’s not quite all that you would want from a film.  Like most films in the genre, a lot of the focus and ingenuity is focused on that level without enough interest to dig deeper, which is not necessarily a problem just a reality of the genre.  The Furious has been touted as the greatest new action epic since The Raid. It is not entirely up to that level of comparison; there is considerably less going on under the hood once you get past the high-wire theatrics and stunt work, but it is the kind of action film we periodically need to remind us why we love the genre in the first place. 

When Wang Wei (Miao), a mute Chinese national with a mysterious past and formidable kung fu skills, sees his daughter kidnapped by a group of street thugs, he launches a one-man rampage through a shadowy Southeast Asian underworld to find her and bring her home. Plowing his way through an increasingly stylized assortment of memorable goons, many of whom could easily have been Street Fighter opponents, he uncovers a deeper well of corruption built around exploiting the children of the area, stealing them from their parents and selling them into sexual slavery.  Along the way he runs into former police offer Navin (Taslim) looking for the same answers he is.  Together they join forces to destroy the children smuggling ring and find some measure of revenge, even as the violence destroys everyone around them.

As he picks up nearly as many allies as enemies, Wang Wei continues charging headlong into one brutal confrontation after another, each one providing a new reason for Tanigaki and his team to unleash truly incredible fight choreography. A little bit of Death Wish, a fair amount of Assault on Precinct 13, and a whole lot of Bruce Lee and Donnie Yen, The Furious stakes out solid ground for itself as a modern martial arts showcase. In that sense, it is among the purest of modern kung fu films: deeply sentimental, almost entirely without irony, and willing to embrace both the best and worst habits of the genre.  At the same time it’s impossible not to wish some of the creativity on display in the action couldn’t have been extended to the story itself.   Though serious and frequently tragic The Furious is one-note enough that it becomes difficult to feel much for the characters’ successes or defeats. They are caricatures more than humans; machines built to put on a kung fu show, which they do extremely well, but not extensive drama.  Tanigaki seems to know this, throwing in a new fight scene every five seconds or so just to keep us distracted. The Furious is a mile wide, but only an inch deep.

Tanigaki’s background as an action director and choreographer is visible from the very beginning, as The Furious opens with hard-hitting, acrobatic kung fu sequences that are thrilling, hilarious, and unbelievable all at once. And yet somehow it continues upping the ante, moving through an underground fighting pit, a strange ice house where the villain’s enemies are frozen to death, and eventually into the bowels of a secret prison.  Tanigaki is keenly aware of both the limits of his actors and stunt performers and the possibilities of his surroundings, and he uses everything to maximum effect and then some. There is nothing too far, no limit he will not push past, giving The Furious a sense of the absurd that wouldn’t be out of place in Jackie Chan’s work and yet doesn’t feel derivative or out of place.

And maybe that’s enough to keep its deficiencies at bay.  By the time we get to the final battle, with five different combatants all fighting one another for different reasons and from different backgrounds, all that remains is the rhythm of the moment.  The thinness of the story has largely fallen away.   Does it yank you out of the movie sometimes when there is a particularly bad line reading, or when people survive being hit full force in the head with a sledgehammer, thrown out of four-story windows, or hit by cars, only to get back up and keep running?   It can, but at the same time, that is what The Furious is here for: a headlong rush of adrenaline that carries you from beginning to end.

7 out of 10

Starring Xie Mao, Joe Taslim, Yang Enyou, Brian Le and Yayan Ruhian. Directed by Kenji Tanigaki.

A. Rimbaud

Patrick Wang’s A Bread Factory remains, ten years on, my preference for the best film of the 2010s and one of the best of the 2000s so far.  Intricate, layered, full of constant surprise and humanity it was a filmed play (and that is not at all a pejorative the way it can be) taking the best of classic stage drama as the core of his filmmaking.  A. Rimbaud, Wang’s first film in almost decade, does very much the same thing while being in almost all ways a completely different experience.  A one-man play, shorn of mis en scene, ensemble or anything else to distract from its character or narrative, it nonetheless holds the attention across the entirety of a man’s life.   Thrilling, engaging, difficult, and requiring much of its viewer, A. Rimbaud unique and challenging choices are a prime example of what makes Wang’s filmmaking so interesting and intricate to begin with.

Picking up with Rimbaud as a young man embarking on his first foray’s into poetry, A. Rimbaud follows his youthful daliances and thoughts before discarding them in favor of a working life as a merchant in Cyprus.  Ignoring the siren call of Rimbaud’s artistic endeavors – the elements making him a target for a biopic at all – Wang instead chooses to focus on the man, what he thought about the world around him at different points in his life and through that why he choose to leave art behind and become a middle class striver, something his peers could never understand about him.  It’s not clear Wang does either, we’re all still external to Rimbaud’s internal life even within the film itself, but it’s the most direct examination of it ever.  Just as Rimbaud does, Wang quickly and directly leaves his poetry behind to keep his eyes in direct focus on the poet.

By giving up nearly all of the external trappings of film, Wang is able to focus more definitively and concretely on Rimbaud’s life: what he thought about his circumstances, how he reacted to them, and, more importantly, how those circumstances changed him over time, revealing the complexities of a human life.   We don’t really see his youth or earliest days. The film begins with his internal initiation as a young man into a self of his own, and then follows that self as it grows and changes in response to the world around him, and very specifically how his tempestuous relationships with his closest friends and family change and reveal him until he is occupying a mind and a history as far from poetry as one might imagine it possible to be.  One can imagine the young Rimbaud at the beginning of the film looking ahead to where he eventually ends up with nothing but derision and distaste, in a way that suggests his artistic impulses almost had nothing to do with him, even though they were purely a product of his life at that time.

In the process, Wang delves more deeply into Rimbaud the poet than most biopics of this type, showing us the real person behind the creation, in all of his facets, and, in doing so, giving us a new understanding of how someone created what they did and, in many ways, how completely removed a work of art can be from its creator.  Notably it is always through conversation, albeit conversations we can only ever hear one side of, making the film almost epistolary in nature.  Letters from the past delivered over time, they become like a documentary of solo evolution in time lapse.  It goes without saying that none of this would work without the strength of Blake Draper’s performance. He has to hold the screen, and our attention, for the entire three hours by himself, with almost nothing else to hold on to, not even a set to hide behind. With growing confidence and verve, he gradually takes over more and more of the screen until you forget that he is the sole presence here. It is a dynamic tightrope act between writer-director Wang and actor Draper, one that either of them could lose their balance and fall from at any point, but neither does.

Perhaps the first real attempt, in text or film, to try and answer the questions about why Rimbaud made the life choices he did, and what that has to say about the art he created, A. Rimbaud requires a very real amount of effort and work from its audience, but it’s work that will be rewarded.  Patrick Wang’s previous film was easily one of the best of the decade in which it came out. It is entirely possible that we may be able to say the same for A. Rimbaud may say the same for the 2020s.

8.5 out of 10

Starring Blake Draper. Directed by Patrick Wang.

Disclosure Day

Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day is one of his most frustrating offerings, visually inventive but also reductive and regressive. Working with many of his favorite collaborators from 50 years of filmmaking—including writer David Koepp, composer John Williams, and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski—has produced a film very much like many of the ones he has made over that time span. Stylistically immaculate, crafted at the highest level, and filled with recognizable flourishes, Disclosure Day offers little in the way of new visual or thematic discovery. Its imagery recalls War of the Worlds and Minority Report, and frequently, deliberately, reaches further back toward the awe-struck vocabulary of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, revealing similar thematic thinking that was fresh and interesting in the 1970s but has not evolved in any real way since then. The result is a film that looks effortlessly accomplished, but also strangely recycled.

At its core is Dr. Daniel Kellner (O’Connor), a mathematician on the run from a shadow organization led by a shadowy man (Firth), with a backpack filled with video proof of the existence of extraterrestrials on Earth stretching back decades—knowledge that could upend Earth’s beliefs about itself the way Copernican observation did to the Church. And like Copernicus, Kellner is persecuted for it, hounded through middle America as he tries to bring his proof to a former insider (Domingo) intent on releasing the information to the world. His secret weapon, whether he realizes it or not, is Missouri weatherwoman Margaret Fairchild (Blunt), after she spontaneously develops the ability to understand everyone and everything, reading minds and seeing over great distances to view the world as it really is, including its alien visitors.

It’s a recipe for exquisite strangeness and some genuinely taut tension, especially when Scanlon uses the alien technology at his disposal to take over the mind of Kellner’s ex-nun girlfriend (Hewson) to ferret out his location. It’s also a premise that might have felt urgent in the X-Files-shaped atmosphere of the 1990s, but in the 2020s it lands awkwardly, out of step with a political culture whose conspiratorial imagination has shifted into darker, more paranoid, and more political territory. Some of this may be intentional, or at least in keeping with the spirit of Disclosure Day’s themes; it clearly wants to ask large questions, not only about where we came from and where we are going, but about our relationship to belief itself. More specifically, it is interested in modern Christian belief and how faith changes when confronted with radical new information from outside the known world. Copernicus rears his head again.

The trouble is that David Koepp’s script approaches these ideas in the most surface-level and prosaic way possible. Casting Jane as a former novitiate offers the kind of lazy backdoor to stage direct, explicit conversations about belief that a better movie would be cagier about, as if the audience may not understand otherwise. That loss is especially frustrating because the movie repeatedly gestures toward richer conflicts. The apparent beginnings of World War III with North Korea, for instance, form a counter textual crisis to the hidden one involving the aliens. The two should converge, with one revealing or transforming the other. Instead, the geopolitical crisis is kept so firmly in the background to keep focus on Kellner and Fairchild and their bloodless chase that it may as well not exist at all.

The same is true of the film’s most intriguing human conflict, which is not its heroes at all—they are, in fact, a little bland—but its shadowy puppet masters, Firth and Domingo. Disclosure Day offers repeated hints and provocations about their long, complicated history, a history that seems to speak directly to the film’s larger ideas, but which is pushed away in order to focus on keeping the plot moving.

Blunt is fantastic as Fairchild, a television weatherwoman blessed with one of the film’s great character names. She is the perfect communicator: a woman intuitively linked to the strange events unfolding around her. It’s a role that could easily be turned into a plot device, but, like Samantha Morton’s work in Minority Report, Blunt transforms her clear plot contrivances into emotional trauma and wonderment. She becomes the beating heart of the film. O’Connor is a more prosaic Spielberg hero, there largely to carry the physical demands of the adventure sequences. He is effective in that role, but he and Blunt, by design, spend much of the film running from forces they barely understand, toward a destination they can hardly define.

Still, Spielberg’s command of action remains formidable, particularly in a beautifully constructed train set piece in which O’Connor and Blunt’s car is nearly forced into the path of an oncoming train, requiring them to escape onto the train itself before being crushed. For all the passing years, Spielberg has lost none of his visual splendor, nor his ability to build tension and deliver a clean, propulsive set piece.

That mastery only makes the film’s limitations more glaring. Almost everything in Disclosure Day feels old-fashioned and out of date, right down to the clownish antics of the supposedly deadly soldiers tasked with capturing the heroes and preventing them from releasing their information to the world. Spielberg’s craft remains impeccable, but the film’s ideas feel timid, familiar, and oddly insulated from the moment it is trying to address. For all its ominous proclamations, and truly intriguing build early on, there’s just not much to see here.

5.5 out of 10

Starring Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, Colman Domingo, Wyatt Russell and Henry Lloyd-Hughes. Directed by Steven Spielberg

Mortal Kombat II

After a more successful than not second bite at the apple of making a Mortal Kombat film, something that had already been done somewhat successfully once, Simon McQuoid and the Atomic Monster team are back to take a second bite at the apple of making a Mortal Kombat sequel, something that previously only been a miserable failure and quite possibly one of the worst films ever made.  So low bar.  And mostly successfully cleared!  Taking lessons learned from his first attempt at a “grounded, R-rated Mortal Kombat film” McQuoid and company have ditched most what didn’t work the first time around, along with some of what did, and ended up making something not too different from Paul W.S. Anderson’s first attempt at the franchise thirty-some odd years ago.

Despite victory during the previous Mortal Kombat tournament, Earthrealm is under assault once again, this time directly from the evil emperor of Outworld, Shao Kahn (Ford) himself. Needing to bulk up Earthrealm’s forces for the coming confrontation, Lord Raiden (Asano) has pulled in a new audience surrogate to have the depths of the game’s lore explained to, this time in the form of has-been action star (and original game native) Johnny Cage (Urban).  Joining the survivors of the previous film, Cage and company must mount a defense against a seemingly unstoppable foe and destroy the source of Shao Khan’s powers if they are to have any hope of saving their world.

Cheeky, cheesy and much more focused on over-the-top (to the point of silliness) violence than a ‘grounded take’ on the venerable gaming franchise, Mortal Kombat II is still a large improvement over the first film.  That can almost entirely be marked down to the sidelining of original character Cole (Tan) – who worked neither in conception nor execution – and replacing him with literal movie star charisma.  A more straightforward admittance by a filmmaker that their previous decision was a mistake (particularly from a film successful enough to gin up a sequel) is hard to find.  And it mostly works!  Urban immediately takes over every scene he is in, embodying a mixture of dynamic competence and Hollywood lethargy that is hard to combine, as both action star and comedic foil.  If anything he risks upsetting what is still an ensemble, as any scene without him noticeably flags.  Only Josh Lawson’s Kano (one of several dead characters making a miraculous return) can really keep up with him.

McQuoid has also shifted dramatically tone wise focusing more on silliness and a light tone, albeit trying as hard as possible (and probably too hard) to maintain an R-rating, with more of a Deadpool vibe than the previous film’s seriousness.  All it lacks is a character speaking directly to camera.  This is most fully summed up in the return of another piece of the game’s original setting which the first film somehow incredibly avoided – the actual tournament itself.  Characters are shifted, often without warning, to familiar recreations of classic arenas for one-on-one battles which are frequently the high points of the film even when some of the effects become dodgy.

 A side effect of this, and the larger cast, is a heavy emphasis on exposition, particularly in the first act as Johnny is brought up to speed on what he is being brought in to.  Even Urban has difficulty doing anything with this, no matter how much he swears through it, and it continues to bog down much of the film which wants some level of emotional catharsis but has little time to build to it having ejected so much of the previous film.  It also creates strange tonal clashes particularly when it reaches most forcefully back to the arrival of the first film with the return of Hiroyuki Sanada’s Scorpion, trapped in a true hell where he must continue fighting his mortal adversary because the audience requires him to.

 All of that could easily work against Mortal Kombat II, but instead it bounces along aided by a strangely affable tone and a willingness to dive into its own silliness in a way everyone was afraid to the first time.  It still has its problems, it might not even be the best version of a Mortal Kombat film, but it is a real improvement over the previous film. Maybe they’ll get a third try this time.

5.5 out of 10

Starring Karl Urban, Adeline Rudolph, Jessica McNamee, Josh Lawson, Ludi Lin,Mehcad Books, Tati Gabrielle, Lewis Tan, Tadanobu Asano and Hiroyuki Sanada. Directed by Simon McQuoid.

Star Wars: Maul - Shadow Lord

Star Wars animation has come a long way.  In its earliest days, well in its earliest days it was a standard Saturday morning license arrangement producing innocuous cartoon commercials in the Transformers/GI Joe era.  And it could have easily remained that way.  Instead, after the conclusion of the Prequel Trilogy, George Lucas decided to turn to animation as means of continuing his story with a focus on quality and storytelling.  The result was … strange, a near anthology of the effects of the Clone Wars (and by extrapolation, war in general) on cast of dozens, bouncing across time and space to tell everything from war stories to thrillers to lore heavy mystic dives and esoteric comedy to economic focused dialectics on banking and war profiteering.  It was a little bit of everything.

What has come since then, and Lucas’ sale and retirement from the company, has been both more and less than that – skirting Clone Wars broad reach for more standardized storytelling while pushing the animation itself further and further from the original shows’ intentionally low detail look.  Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord is in many ways the peak of that decision making process, a leap over the franchises’ most recent animated efforts closing the visual gap in many ways to the live action series it lives alongside while also moving closer to that storytelling style with a less distinct personality as animation.

That means, despite the title, Maul -  Shadow Lord is only partially about the double-bladed lightsaber wielding former Sith Lord. Like many villains their power lies in their mystique tending to lead stories about them to focus on supporting characters rather than focus on the title characters’ inner life.  It’s hard to create an inner life for a monster; far easier the ones who are affected by him.  Much of Maul initially seems to make that same calculation, keeping him in the shadows to build up its bystanders: the police captain (Oscar nominee Moura) trying to hunt him down without alerting the Empire and the hidden Jedi (Adlon and Haysbert) just trying to survive even as Maul starts a gang war with his rival crimelords.

And if it had just stayed like that, Maul would have been one of the franchises more entertaining offerings with villainous villains and staunch heroes and thrilling chases and escapes.  Creator/producer Dave Filonie (Ahsoka) and his team refuse to rest on their laurels; instead of spending all of their time with their new characters responding to Maul the cross conflicts are used to ratchet up tension across the different stories until they have no choice but to intersect one another.  As Lawson’s investigations uncover the two Jedi,  the Empire sends its own Inquisitors to hunt them and Maul down, forcing the groups into alliances of convenience and questioning their own motivations and how true to them they are willing to be.  Moura and his rowdy cohort quickly become match for any band of heroes Star Wars has offered.

Nor is Maul immune to those effects, finally forced into some real introspection about his desire for revenge on his old master while still being blind to how similar they are in outlook and methods.  Witwer,  who has voiced the character for over decade now, gets a chance to do some of his best work as Maul and rises to the challenge.

Which doesn’t make Shadow Lord a character study by any stretch of the imagination.  Once the character intersections are set, particular by the time the Empire and its Inquisitors arrive, it is an exercise in pure adrenaline. With the  increased focus and budgets on the live action series’ it’s easy to wonder why push for animation but it becomes clear once the action beats heat up – none of the live action series could achieve the quality and complexity of action filmmaking Filoni and crew put on.

A fantastic piece of adventure filmmaking that just feels like Star Wars from beginning to end, Shadow Lord is one of the best pieces of animation Lucasfilm has put out since the original Clone Wars.

7.5 out of 10

Starring Sam Witwer, Gideon Adlon, Wagner Moura, Richard Ayoade, Dennis. Haysbert, Chris Diamantopoulos, Charlie Bushnell, Vanessa Marshall and A.J. LoCascio.

Daredevil: Born Again - Season 2

Fixing many of the issues of the first season of Daredevil: Born Again, primarily resulting from the writer replacement and re-configuration the first season went through partway into filming, Born Again season 2 benefits greatly from a more concrete vision and focused storytelling from beginning to end, even as its reach often exceeds its grasp.  Whatever the original, or even second plan had been, Daredevil has been retrofitted into a commentary on modern times, and the authoritarian measures the federal government has been increasingly using on top of the never-ending superhero battle between the Kingpin of Crime (D’Onofrio) and the masked vigilante Daredevil (Cox).  It is an ill-fit at best, hampered by its straightforward style and focus on story exposition over subtlety … Andor this is not. Which doesn’t mean it is not frequently a very good Daredevil series.

After gradually, begrudgingly, retaking the Daredevil mantle following the murder of his best friend, Matt Murdock (Cox) finds himself on the run from his old foe Mayor Fisk (D’Onofrio) who has declared marshal law in New York and all vigilantes outlawed, even as he searches for evidence of Fisk’s true plan.  It appears in the form of a freighter of illegal weapons Fisk is shipping for a shadowy CIA operator (Lillard), a chink in the armor which Murdock and Karen Page (Woll) race to exploit even as they dodge arrest.

After the gradual, unfocused discussions of the first season the singular idea of Born Again Season 2 is Murdock’s fight against a proxy-ICE in the form of Fisk’s Anti-Vigilante Task Force providing the kind of catharsis the real world often cannot which is the original draw of the superhero story in the first place.  It’s a welcome change of pace, helped by centering on Murdock and Page’s on-again / off-again relationship within the resistance and pushing therapist Heather Glenn (Levieva) to the side as she grapples with surviving a serial killer’s assault.  In the midst of it all there is an unmistakable feeling of returning to old ideas as Murdock still finds himself fighting the Kingpin as well as his eternally returning foe Bullseye (Bethel).  At a certain point it is clear to both the characters, the actors and the writers that Matt needs to move on – and by the end there is a welcome feeling of clearing of deck chairs – but uncertainty about exactly what that will look like.

What that results in is a series which sounds better in summation than it is in experience.  As good as it can be in its quieter moments, particularly as Matt grapples with his Catholic beliefs around forgiveness in the face of what his enemies have done, the attempts to move to larger political points fall flat primarily in the execution.  No one can think of any way to say things except in the most plain manner possible which can work but doesn’t and leaves showrunner Dario Scardapane backed into a corner for a climax which must address these core themes in some way other than a physical confrontation.

Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 is a thoroughly more well thought out show than its predecessor willing to take big swings not seen since the series’ earliest days.  The follow-through is frustratingly not always up to the task but with a sense of the series moving on from its oldest tropes and starting a new status quo for season 3 – including the welcome return of several Defenders colleagues – the future looks bright ahead.

7 out of 10.

Starring Charlie Cox, Vincent D’Onofrio, Deborah Ann Woll, Wilson Bethel, Margarita Levieva, Genneya Walton, Michael Gandolfini, Arty Froushan, Matthew Lillard, Clark Johnson, Ayelet Zurer, Krysten Ritter, Tony Dalton, Camila Rodriguez and Lili Taylor.

Project Hail Mary

The kind of high-minded science fiction Hollywood rarely produces these days, the adaptation of the newest Andy Weir novel is very much like the adaptation of The Martian with enough now familiar ‘Weir-isms’ that the form is starting to be defined.  This includes extended, video assisted epistles to push the exposition along without dragging it down among scattered humor and can-do optimism crashing into supposedly impossible problems.  Within that filmmaking duo Lord and Miller (The Lego Movie) have pulled out a supremely human film buoyed by the friendship between a man and a rock, and a reminder what big-budget studio filmmaking can accomplish.  Project Hail Mary is a breath of fresh air even as it starts to wear out its welcome.

Which is not to say it feels completely original the way Weir’s first attempt at heady, humanistic sci-fi did.  Beginning as blog entries, the original version of The Martian made logical use of the medium it was first created for to resurrect the epistolary form with a series of recordings by its doomed astronaut documenting his attempt to save himself (rather than letters of doomed 17th century melodrama the form is more known for). Having broken through and with all the options for storytelling available without the need to sell himself again, Weir’s followed was told in … a series of recordings by its doomed astronaut, Ryland Grace, (Gosling) documenting his attempt to save Earth.

Except for the points where his recordings also include his alien best friend, Rocky (Ortiz).

Which is clearly the biggest, and best, change from The Martian – and not because it has an actual Martian, or Erid --  that Grace has someone to talk to and bounce off of even as he grapples with both the how great the problem is he is trying to solve and the reality he will probably not survive the attempt.

The Sun is dying, its fuel being slowly eaten away by a strange alien microbe which can survive the extreme temperatures and seems unstoppable.  Faced with the possibility of extinction, the human race marshals all of its resources in finding a solution under the firm control of Eva Stratt (Hüller) who makes clear there is nothing she won’t do to succeed.  When Grace, dis-Graced astrobiologist with some strange idea about life in the galaxy who has been reduced to teaching high school, discovers the possibility of a cure in the far reaches of space a bold plan is developed to send a crew of astronauts on a potentially one-way journey to the star Tau Ceti.  Including Grace, whether he likes it or not.

Though its individual scenes are frequently stolen by Rocky and, when she’s around Hüller, it sits on Gosling’s shoulders who carries Project Hail Mary with grace and charm.  It takes a strong presence to carry extended amounts of screen time alone, potentially without dialogue (unless, like 2001, the film is specifically trying to underplay presence or humanity), a situation Grace finds himself in when he awakens around Tau Ceti from a medically induced coma to discover none of his other crewmates survived the trip and he has lingering retrograde amnesia from the coma.  Facing the terror of being alone in a spaceship in the middle of nowhere and no idea what to do, Grace responds with … math.  What could easily be overdone either in its dread or its silliness instead balances steadily between the two without overwhelming.  It speaks volumes to Lord and Miller’s facility with comedy and Gosling’s willingness to just go for it against a literal backdrop of nothing. It’s the kind of difficult acting work which can easily go unnoticed but requires depth at the level of representing trauma as well.

It doesn’t last, but that’s a good thing. Shortly after arriving in orbit around Tau Ceti, Grace is joined by an alien spacecraft sent from 40 Eridani which is suffering the same problem as Earth and which also has only one survivor … a three limbed rock creature Grace nicknames ‘Rocky.’  After overcoming the differences in communication the unlikely pair find themselves jointly battling against loneliness and isolation as much as the lifeform destroying their solar systems, transforming Hail Mary from heady sci-fi drama to buddy movie until it realizes it has to snap back to its plot.

In between Grace gradually recovers more memories about how he got into his present circumstances … a device which is very useful before Rocky arrives and much less so after.  Hail Mary falls into this trap more than once, unsure what to trim and what to keep and tacking on more and more material from the book to an increasingly lengthy run time.

For the most part, the film can weather it with the strength of Gosling’s movie star chops and some genuinely inspired imagery from Lord and Miller adding grandeur to an ultimately human story of connection and friendship.

Hollywood should probably make some more movies like this. Weir should write something different next time out, though.

8 out of 10.

Starring Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller, James Ortiz, Lionel Boyce, Ken Leung, Milana Vayntrub and Priya Kansara. Directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller.

Send Help

Don’t give up on your dreams and don’t let them fester and die in the exchange for some financial security.  Climg to them and chase them against all odds and common sense until they drive you to madness and murder in their pursuit.  That’s the American Dream in Sam Raimi’s world, or at least within the world of Send Help.  A nightmarish take on the Swept Away genre of castaway romance blended with comedy, cynicism and copious bodily fluids, Send Help is the old school Evil Dead director returned to a dazzlingly bleak and entertaining world built around the question of who is the least vile.

Your first thought would not be mousy financial manager Linda Liddle (McAdams), a quiet cubicle worker diligently working towards her long desired promotion before going home to her pet parrot.  Of course, your first thought would not be she is also a multiple-time candidate to appear on “Survivor” with a wealth of knowledge under her fingertips about taming an uncivilized wilderness if she ever found herself stranded on one.  People have depths.  Some people; not so much her new boss Bradley Preston (O’Brien) who has inherited wealth without working for it and has no idea how to survive in the wild (and was preparing to fire Linda).  When the company plane does indeed crash in the Pacific Ocean the unlikely pair finds themselves stuck together with the possibility of something new growing between them.

And that something new is hatred and mania.

Send Help plays fast and loose with the tropes of this particular romantic fable, starting from the horrific deaths of the passengers on the plane and the increasingly gory encounters Linda survives trying to keep the pair alive initially.  More importantly it immediately defines Bradley through cartoonish villainy and misogony relative to Linda’s seemingly straightforward goodness and dependability. As the days stretch into weeks, the isolation gradually reveals their truer selves, whitling away their outside pretenses – that Bradley’s shitheel exterior hides a shitheel interior while Linda’s kindness can quickly and easily transform into a hardness unwilling to take no for answer.

In different hands it could be a psychological character study, dispensing with romanticism in favor of pure nihilism as it embraces the darkest sides of human nature.  None of that would be remotely as entertaining as what Raimi has put together as he turns to comedy as much as gore in a delicate balancing act most could not pull off.  That is, if the word delicate could be used to describe a film where McAdams must vomit continually all over O’Brien’s face.  But it’s also true, particularly during its messier third act twist when it appears rescuers may have found the island to end the pairs ordeal possibly before Linda is ready for it to.

The only thing worse than not having a dream, it turns out, is having one and watching it taken away.  Within this setup, Raimi and his two very game stars who must carry almost every scene alone, play that thought out not so much to its logical conclusion as much as its most unhinged just to wink and say this is what we really want.  This, in Raimiville, is the reality of the American Dream, one fueled more by monomaniacal desire than belief and which, if threatened, becomes an engine for destruction.

Just the way it should.

7.5 out of 10

Starring Rachel McAdams, Dylan O’Brien, Edyll Ismail, Xavier Samuel and Chris Prang. Directed by Sam Raimi.

Greenland 2: Migration

When your previous film concludes with the end of the world, where do you go from there?  Underground to watch the remnants of humanity slowly wither and die in Cormac McCarthy style dive into the pitilessness of nature?  Or as Ric Waugh’s follow up chooses, out into the world to admit (or pretend) it didn’t actually end, it was only mostly dead and decisions for the future must be made after all.

Picking up five years after the first film, John Garrity (Butler) and his family have been surviving in an underground bunker in Greenland, believing they are one of the only remaining pockets of humanity left on Earth. But they may not be surviving for much longer. Radiation from the comet strike stubbornly refuses to recede, making it impossible to plant food, while increasing earthquakes threaten to make their refuge uninhabitable. When a scientist friend proposes the mind-bogglingly unlikely theory that the comet's crater in southern France may be teeming with new life—the only place where human civilization can rebuild—the Garrity clan decide they have nothing to lose and embark on the dangerous journey south.

Greenland 2: Migration is the apotheosis of the '70s disaster film brought into the 21st century. That is high praise. The end result is highly episodic and frequently chaotic, with characters and dramatic beats coming and going sometimes without rhyme or reason. Yet it never loses focus on the cost to the family or the desperation Butler faces in keeping everyone alive and safe. No matter how ridiculous some of the plot instances are (you'd think at some point they would learn to stop having picnics in fields—it never goes well for them), it never feels false or wastes time trying to become the action movie it is not.

It would have been extraordinarily easy for the filmmakers to descend into a post-apocalyptic hellscape of violence, cynicism, and brutality and call that depth. While there is certainly petty conflict—not all of which makes sense or works in any logical world-building way—more often it moves into surprising meditation on the detritus of the past and the need to move on from it. Whether they are watching a group of elites hoarding resources in their own bunkers or driving past the ruins of treasure ships on the floor of the now drained English Channel, the ruins of the past are everywhere reaching out grasping fingers to hold them back.  Yes, there are dangerous people who will ambush and rob, but there are also regular people who will help a family in need rather than exploit them. It is in its frequently warm humanity that Migration separates itself from and frequently exceeds the first film, eschewing normal action-oriented thrills for something more like an episodic character drama set against the worst setting imaginable.

This isn't to say the film takes full advantage of its setup. Rather, it bounces from conflict to conflict, never giving any one of them enough time to build into something truly dangerous. Many of these story beats could have been easily expanded into a full film on their own. But frequent Butler collaborator Waugh makes the bolder choice to keep the family heading south into France no matter what, bringing each new episode to a rushed and often surprising end.

This structure gives Butler—and to a lesser extent Morena Baccarin—the opportunity and responsibility of holding the narrative together not with guns or mayhem but through the pathos of their characters recognizing the sheer odds they face. Butler's John Garrity, more than anyone else, carries the weight of the film as he eerily begins coughing up blood early on, suggesting there are no happy endings for him in the near future. Butler plays off that self-knowledge excellently, adding real weight and depth to all the twists and turns the family's voyage takes with the foreknowledge that he has limited time to succeed.

It all creates a film that is somewhat weightier than would be expected, especially for a sequel to the first Greenland. This isn't to say it has a lot on its mind beyond "you really have to do it together"—this is a surface-oriented version of depth. But it's trying in a genre and scenario where it doesn't have to and could potentially hurt itself by doing so. And mostly, it succeeds.

Butler may never get the accolades of a great actor or movie star even when he's had some excellent roles, but Migration is a film held together almost entirely by one actor and their performance—by design as much as by necessity—and that is no easy thing to do.

Greenland 2: Migration is a worthy and frequently superior successor to the first Greenland, throwing out most of the disaster film playbook to make something more episodic and introspective than anyone would have guessed, and ultimately more rewarding as well.

7 out of 10

Starring Gerard Butler, Morena Bacarin, Roman Griffin Davis, Peter Polycarpou, Amber Rose Revah, William Abadie, Sidsel Siem Koch. Directed by Ric Roman Waugh.

Avatar: Fire and Ash

It was not that long ago that Avatar creator-writer-director James Cameron (Titanic) was talking about the film series as his life’s work: an all-encompassing fantasy epic he expected to work on into his old age across four sequels which would take all of his remaining cinematic talent to bring to life.  Recently, however, Cameron’s pronouncements have turned a corner, moving away from the idea of more “Avatar” films and onto other goals such as long rumored film on the nuclear attack on Japan and directing a concert film. After almost 20 years of Avatar it’s a sudden shift, one that seems to have come after watching the final cut of the third and latest Avatar installment, Fire and Ash.

Not that there is anything particularly ‘wrong’ about Cameron’s third trip to Pandora. Everything you would expect to be in an Avatar film is available in this Avatar film; dazzling world building, beautiful vistas, stoic (some might say boring) heroes and greedy but complex villains, all in service of a nature versus industry narrative ending in a fantastic climatic battle tinged in both vengeance and grief.  This is Cameron’s first second sequel, despite his long and celebrated career (or perhaps because of it) Cameron has seldom returned to even his most popular narratives and never more than once and in this attempt he finds himself running into many of the problems that have bedeviled so many other talented filmmakers and make franchise film-making – particularly at the auteur level – more difficult than they may seem at first blush.

Some of that is the timing of the film.  Picking up just weeks after the end of The Way of Water, and just a few years after said film emerged, Fire and Ash doesn’t have the gap of time the previous film or its narrative offered to rethink and reshuffle its status quo.  No new kids or resurrected villains or sudden whale companions.  It focuses more on grief and dealing with the outcomes of the previous films battles which allows for some development but also a lot of repetition. Jake (Worthington) still struggles to connect with his surviving son Lo’ak (Dalton) while protecting his family from the rampaging Quaritch (Lang) and the greedy colonizers he represents.  There are additions and developments, mostly in the form of angry volcano priestess Varang (Chaplin) who raids her fellow Na’vi and has no qualms with joining with Quaritch and his human handlers, bringing him slowly into a dark reflection of the Sully clan.

But it can only go so far and the changes it can make are more decorative than they are substantive. It is hidden somewhat by changing focus, moving away from Lo’ak’s isolation to focus on human offspring Spider (Champion) and his own split between his biological father Quaritch and his chosen home.  It’s the closest thing to a heart Fire and Ash but it is only one of many which keeps the film from ever truly adopting its own identity.  Arcs are picked up from the previous films which, particularly within such a ponderous length, leads to characters repeating conflict and dragging out conclusion beyond any real need barring the requirement for everything to reach a head during the action climax.  The classical unities were probably never thought of having to be applied to such sources and there is an argument to be made for more experimentation.

That is the one thing Fire and Ash is in short supply of.  Barring an early trip on flying airships, Fire and Ash is generally content to return to areas it has spent time in before – visually and thematically – recrossing old tracks until nothing is left but a mire.

It’s as astoundingly visual as any of the films in the series. Russel Carpenter’s cinematography and WETA’s digital effects continue to combine into a rainbow kaleidoscope which, particularly in high frame rate IMAX 3D, can replicate the feel of the most astounding nature documentary ever lensed.  And Cameron remains unparalleled in his ability to stage an action climax. In its first hour Fire and Ash offers three which outstrip any other action film of the year.  The final climactic battle in the island’s vortex heart may be the best of the series.

For the first time, though, it all feels in service of … nothing.  Like Jake’s avatar itself, it looks like one of its siblings but within it can’t help but feel artificial.  Maybe, after all this time and money, it’s best for everyone to move on.

6.5 out of 10

Starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver, Stephan Lang, Oona Chaplin, Cliff Curtis, Britain Dalton, Jack Champion, Kate Winslet, Giovanni Ribisi, Edie Falco and David Thewlis. Directed by James Cameron.

Predator: Badlands

The original Predator was the kind of classically self-contained high concept thriller that much of 80s studio filmmaking has become famous for; a retelling of “The Most Dangerous Game” focused around 80s style action heroes with the hunter replaced by an unstoppable, mandibled alien killer armed with all grains of high technology. It was both fascinatingly over the top – a meme-generator before the term was understood – and easily replicated into future installments.  The alien just needed to be continuously introduced into different environments prepared to slaughter a new group of unsuspecting tough guys.  Like any formula, it faces the reality of diminishing returns as there can only be so many cosmetic changes before the whole thing loses its luster.  At some point it becomes either a self-parody or the Predator must win.

Director Dan Trachtenberg (10 Cloverfield Lane, Prey) has quickly come to the same conclusion. Rather than create a blood-drenched torture fest with no survivors he has decided to pivot to a more heroic version of the monster, creating society and culture (albeit one not easily distinguishable from Star Trek’s Klingons) and understanding for them and their blood-soaked quests. The hunt is how they win their place in their society, and for young outcast Dek (Schuster-Kolomatangi), how he will win a place in his family if not his own survival.  His task is to go to the most dangerous planet in the galaxy and kill the indestructible beast that lies at the heart of it – a feat no one has ever accomplished before.

It's the smart move, adding some real characterization to what had become a rote cliché.  Throwing Dek onto a planet of monsters immediately transforms him into an underdog pushing himself into his own rite of passage against increasingly larger computer-generated monsters and forcing him to reconsider his culture’s views on the other living creatures of the world.  An entire film in that mode, with limited to no dialogue, could have been easily sustainable but Trachtenberg immediately saddles (literally) Dek with a partner – the upper half of broken android Thia (Fanning), a Scarecrow-like lost soul searching for her ‘sister’ and her legs … whichever comes first.

Fanning is so charming and human in the role it quickly and completely makes the choice worthwhile as she allows Dek to remain laconic and mysterious while also deploying all exposition and comic relief.  She is the anchor Badlands is ultimately built around having to simultaneously juggle physical comedy, pathos, genuine emotional pain and – in the dual role of her sister android Tessa – pitiless evil.  She also gives Badlands an easy way out of a sticky corner.  Thia and her ilk are a group of exploring androids from the Alien franchises villainous Weyland-Yutani company, still exploring the galaxy for alien lifeforms to weaponize and coincidentally giving Dek an army of human-looking villains to slaughter without the attendant blood or questions about who to root for.

(It also shows the series following Alien in its focus on AI as the true alien intelligence to be feared).

There are losses as much as gains in the approach; they mystery of the monsters takes a forever backseat in favor of their coolness and options to root for them.  It also must be asked how long and far they can be pushed in this direction before uncomfortable questions (and perhaps real drama) can be found.

But in the moment none of that matters.  What matters is a fresh perspective invigorating an old idea, even if only for a little while.  Between Fanning’s commitment and Trachtenberg’s imagination, Predator is alive again.  Let’s see how long it can remain that way.

Nuremburg

James Vanderbilt’s Nuremburg is a nearly perfect studio film.  This doesn’t mean it’s a perfect film by any stretch of the imagination.  It can be creaky with some obvious conflict and climax, surprises turned away in favor of setup and explication with a flair for stagey performance. A perfectly cromulent drama.  But it is more than that, an exemplar of the fading studio drama form from stage design and story layout to performance and perfectly pitched music cue to push important moments.  Once they outnumbered the stars in their ubiquity, the definition of what Hollywood filmmaking was and from which most of the known canon evolved.  Now, nearly extinct on the big screen as movie going culture changes, they are like endangered animals encountered in the wild – both marveled at that they still exist but with a touch of melancholy that this might be the last time we see one. 

Even the subject matter is perfect; Hollywood has produced more films about the Nazis and World War II than almost any other subject since the event occurred.  Can anything more be said about them through this particular lens and/or transplanted onto our modern world?  We will certainly know one way or the other by the end; in this case by the end of the famous Nuremburg trials.  The second major studio take on the event follows less the legal structure and indictments of the trials and more the interaction of the Allied psychiatrists (Malek and Hanks) tasked with analyzing this strange group of human monsters for fitness to stand trial and find out what, if anything, led them to do what they did and whether they felt any guilt at all. 

These types of films tend to be performance showcases and Nuremburg is no different.  Essentially a two-hander between Malek’s Kelley and Crowe’s Göring, it’s ultimately not much about the psychology of the Nazi’s or even the difficulties of the trials (which can make them seem tacked on when they appear) as much as it is Kelley’s arrogant obliviousness of the reality of the men he is chronicling amid his certainty he can understand them. Unable to understand how such mostly normal seeming individuals could have done such terrible things he unconsciously pushes the thought aside until he is unable to see any forests at all anymore, only trees.  It’s the sort of cracking restraint Malek excels at and he fits the role like a glove, though much of the success comes from performing opposite a Crowe who is more restrained than he has been in years.  Göring’s madness instead pierces always from his eyes but goes no further.  It's no accident Nuremburg is most alive and has a character of its own when it’s left to just the two of them.

Outside of that Vanderbilt’s script is a more standard dramatic affair, attempting to make larger points about the trial’s focus and the importance of them to prevent the recurrence of the defendants’ crimes – not to mention how easily it is for such crimes to appear in other nations – with strained monologues and more standard courtroom sequences. The dramatic impetus must then be some sort of confession by Göring on the witness stand, a feat left to chief prosecutor Robert Jackson (Shannon) guided by Kelley’s work.  Can the psychiatrist be trusted or has he grown to close to his subjects to see the truth? 

It's fine, if unremarkable; and yet amazing in its complete adequacy. Even ten years ago it would have been one of dozens of like-minded and toned films coming important elements in the most reductive way possible, the end result of surviving the studio process. Now so few can even attempt such a process; what comes out the other side is less static melodrama and more artifact of the past, out of style even at its creation as filmmaking and filmmakers try to figure what the new version of the form will be.  In that sense it should be intensely studied and treasured before we don’t get any more like it.

6.5 out of 10

Starring Rami Malek, Russell Crowe, Leo Woodall, John Slattery, Mark O’Brien, Colin Hanks and Michael Shannon. Directed by James Vanderbilt.

Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale

Things change. The original television version of Downton Abbey was about many things, but like all period drama it was ultimately it was showing us what we had come from to better know what we were now.  Downton Abbey the series is no more immune to that than anything else; viewers of the original would be hard pressed to recognize it in Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale.  Much of what it once was – social friction, reserved romance, repressed melodrama – hasn’t been jettisoned so much as concluded.  The daughters married, most of the servants settled, the estate ordered; short of repeating old stories, there’s little left to do. What’s left is less a finale than an epilogue.

Everyone is here of course, and then some, but also not to the level you would expect. Most of the series familiar faces are pushed to mere cameos, reminding us they exist but also that their stories are spent. The classic “Upstairs, Downstairs” braid gives way to a narrower focus on the avuncular Robert Crawley (Bonneville) and his wife and daughters as they traverse the handoff of ownership of Downton to Lady Mary.  The transition is jeopardized when Lady Cora's (McGovern) brother Harold (Giamatti) informs her that much of the family capital has been lost due to bad investment.  As the spring festival and the time for Lady Mary's ascension draws near everyone hunts for a solution, but the drama never crests; the world’s formality calcifies into formula.

It didn't have to be this way, there are tendrils of the old Downton in view even if they are batted away and brushed under the carpet to keep out of view.  As much as Downton lived and breathed on the social dynamics between the Crawley’s and their servants, it was also the melodrama of the romances each group suffered which powered the old show.  Creator-writer Julian Fellowes still has that old instinct as Lady Mary’s ill-conceived marriage to racing enthusiast Henry Talbot crumbles around her, ending in divorce and social castigation.  Where the old Fellowes would have made that the centerpiece of his plot, with Mary and family deciding if the exile was worth the end of the pain while the family servants looked on and gossiped about it despite their own internal stripes, this version wraps it up off screen before the film has even begun.

In theory that is to spend more time focusing on the social fallout and how that may jeopardize Robert’s plan to hand control of the estate to Mary and the next generation. And that may have been the original idea but in between came the the realization that there were so many other things which needed to be dealt with like kitchen servant Daisy becoming part of the spring festival planning committee and the introduction of newcomer Gus Sandbrook (Nivola) and his plan to restore the family fortune. Mary's social stigma is reduced to an excuse for Lady Edith (Carmichael) to plan a grand party in order to invite back all of the family members and former servants for one last time in front of the camera.

It's as beautiful as ever and the hints and nods of great societal change are still there they are merely hints and nods. Downton Abbey is a shadow of its former self not just because times changed for it but because times change for us. Rather than use the past as a reflection on today the way the original series did the best anyone can muster in the Grand Finale is a limp wave of farewell and they hope that a dash of nostalgia will make it go down well. It probably is all that an old fan of the series could want; one last short romp and, short of death, a final stroll into the sunset for the old series. But like watching a beloved athlete in their final season, it’s impossible not to compare what is to what was.

6 out of 10.

Starring Hugh Bonneville, Michelle Dockery, Elizabeth McGovern, Laura Carmichael, Alessandro Nivola, Paul Giamatti, Jim Carter and Joanne Froggatt. Starring Simon Curtis.

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Movie: Infinity Castle

As a child, diving into long running series had no terror or qualms.  Chapter 234 may as well have been chapter one. The high numbers and rich history were not a roadblock but an invitation to gather as much as possible through context clues with a confidence boarding on delusion that the major points would shine through, and missing backstory could eventually be sussed out.  Somewhere in the winding path to adulthood that view is lost; late chapters become a warning instead, of a story or characters to layered or developed to understand short of going back to the beginning and starting fresh and who has the time for that?  Like the demons and demon slayers of Koyoharu Gotouge’s popular manga, our own growth has cost us a piece of ourselves.

If you want to try and push back the hands of time, you could jump feet first without preparation into Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Movie: Infinity Castle.  Not because it will generate a fuzzy recollection of what childhood was like in the manner of a Pixar film and more the way it drops you into a long running narrative of many characters without explanation or lifeline.  Demon’s need slaying and it’s sink or swim.  This much is clear: the Demon Slayer’s are an organization of highly trained martial artists studying to fight and kill supernatural menaces preying on mankind. Their key target is an ancient demon lord named Muzan who has retreated to an impossible fortress which seems to go on forever. The Demon Slayers have somehow invaded it in an attempt to find and dispatch Muzan for good (usually requiring a decapitation to achieve), though they will have to fight through many of his strongest general’s first.

This much more is clear – this is not just the middle of larger narrative but only one part of that middle.  There is no resolution to be had here, either narrative or thematic.  Despite dropping in media res and continuing on for more than two and a half hours Infinity Castle continues on to its next chapter with a breeziness and lack of concern no film outside of the genre could hope to achieve without audience revolt.  The temptation to stand up at the end and cry “that’s it!” is strong, but also not entirely warranted as there is some meat to be had even as it spends tremendous amounts of time on specific characters history and nature after their key conflicts have been resolved.

Most of that history revolves around pain, and a related obsession with strength.  Not every Demon Slayer in the group gets much in the way of focus to set them apart.  Most of Infinity Castle’s focus is only a handful battling their own literally personal demons; primarily orphan warrior Shinobu (Harlacher) finally coming face-to-face with the monster (Fu) who killed her older sister, young swordsman Zenitsu facing his brother-turned-demon jealous of Zenitsu’s relationship with their grandfather and Tanjiro’s (Aguilar) failures against an unstoppable martial artist (Dodge) who can survive anything thrown at him.  The one key line connecting all of them is pain, either from loss or from jealousy or some other internalized fear, leading to a need to grow strong enough to avoid such pain ever again. It’s a unique reaction both hunters and hunted embrace and in their turn leads them to hurt others the way they’ve been hurt.  Demons aren’t demons in Demon Slayer; they’re pain and the core of cycles of abuse which can’t be ultimately vanquished.  Only faced and at some level only dealt with by ignoring them. Those who can’t, will ultimately die.

Where it’s leading is impossible to say (unless you’ve already read the books) and it’s hard to say yet if there’s more to the series than these general ideas which are repeated in long, drawn out character moments for clarity.  In between there is some startling beautiful animation, from the castle’s fascinating design to the chaotic fight sequences, which may be primarily surface oriented but offers enough pleasures to get around that.  There’s no doubt there will be more – there is still plenty of plot out there – but will there be more amid the more?  Time will tell but it’s a good start so far.

6 out of 10.

Starring Zach Aguilar, Abby Trott, Aleks Le, Bryce Papenbook, Brianna Knickerbocker, Zeno Robinson and Johnny Yong Bosch. Directed by Haruo Sotozaki.

F1

Slow is smooth and smooth is fast, the old saying goes.  Joseph Kosinski’s F1 is incredibly smooth, as well oiled a professional piece of filmmaking as you will find, a modern day Days of Thunder shorn of all rough edges so that it can cut through the air like a knife.  In the process it sometimes cuts through logic, originality or characterization but it’s infuriatingly entertaining it’s easy to ignore how straightforwardly uninterested its screenplay is in human beings.  That’s not what anyone is really here for; they’re here for Formula One cars sliding around tracks at 200mph and Brad Pitt’s movie star charisma, neither of which have anything to do with being human.  But given the right place and the right context, they’re just about the only thing that matters.

It’s much the same for Sonny Hayes (Pitt), an itinerant race car driver who only seems to make any sort of sense behind a steering wheel.  Moving from track to track as hired gun for anyone who needs a killer, Sonny barely speaks to regular people or understand what makes them tick – probably because he barely understands himself.  But once behind the wheel of a car, or arguing with another driver, and all questions and concerns fall away as embraces something he does understand.  After years of drifting he finally gets to put that talent to the test when his old teammate (Bardem), now Formula One team owner, asks him to do the impossible: lift the worst team in the division from last place, past the best drivers in the world, and win at least one Formula One Grand Prix.

And in the process, translate the thrilling speed of the race into a cinematic spectacle in a way film has seldom captured.  That’s a tall order, for Sonny and for the filmmakers.

Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix has rightly been hailed for decades as the definitive car race film.  The way it put cameras, and through them the audience, down into the point of view of the cars racing along the tarmac amongst stark cutting created a unique view of speed that quickly became part of the car chase lexicon, lending power to its melodramatic elements.  Kosinki’s approach is not any different, just smoother, taking all of the tools of the last 60 years to bring us more into the middle of the race than ever before.  He realizes, as Frankenheimer once did, that the human beings don’t matter because the creates the audience wants to be are the metal beasts careening around the tarmac within inches of one another, always risking disaster.  The personal trials of Sonny to win one last race or rookie Joshua Pearce (Idris) to live up to his potential pale in comparison to that, which is why it’s perfectly fine that they are as thin as paper or lacking any sort of emotional connection.

What it lacks in interesting storylines (the patchwork framework of F1 is the desiccated corpse of every sports movie to date pinned together with tropes and the kind of dialogue that survives through studio development) it makes up for in pure charisma, both from the cars and from Pitt’s old fashioned movie star mastery.  F1 is the kind of film made for a Hollywood star to sit in a car, look cool and charm his way through scenes.  That’s not a bug, it’s a feature; it was done that way for so long because it works, even if we’ve forgotten.  It worked then and it works now.  No, F1 doesn’t have a core of internal drama or character realization adding to the onscreen fireworks the way Kosinski’s superior Top Gun: Maverick did.  It has a Formula One driver who lives in a Volkswagen Minibus and has a gambling problem, and for a film like F1 it really doesn’t need anything more.

The genius of F1 lies not in what it aspires to be, but in what it refuses to pretend it isn't; it is here to deliver one specific experience: the vicarious thrill of speed, danger, and effortless cool. Kosinski understands that sometimes the most honest thing a film can do is embrace its own superficiality, to polish that surface until it becomes a mirror that reflects our desire to be somewhere else, someone else, moving faster than humanly possible. In an era where blockbusters often buckle under the weight of their own self-importance, F1 succeeds by staying in its lane, never apologizing for being exactly the kind of star vehicle that Hollywood used to build with confidence. It's a machine built for pleasure, nothing more and nothing less, and like the best machines, it does exactly what it was designed to do.

7.5/10

Starring Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Kerry Condon, Javier Bardem, Tobias Menzies, Kim Bodnia, Sarah Niles and Will Merrick. Directed by Joseph Kosinski.

Jurassic World Rebirth

During World War II, Allied Forces built airstrips around Melanesia as staging posts for fighters and bombers to refuel and resupply for long distance combat against Japanese forces.  To the indigenous tribes living on the islands it was as if the gods themselves had come down, literally flying down from the heavens and leaving artifacts of their passing behind.  Such was the impact of these moments that after the war, when the military had left and no more cargo came to the islands, some islanders began building mock airstrips, control towers and even planes out of the bamboo, wood, reeds and other elements they had at hand, trying to bring the precious cargo drops back by replicating the surface conditions of their arrival without ever comprehending what they had witnessed or how it happened the way it did.

One imagines a similar reaction from a generation of filmmakers watching Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park when it first came out (or George Lucas’ Star Wars before it), filled with awe at the cinematic spectacle but unable to understand what was going on beneath the surface to make it work the way it did, just knowing they wanted to experience it again.  Certainly a generation of studio executives did.  And the result is the cargo cult version of the original: a replication without spirit or soul, trying to call back the original through ritualistic adherence to the forms rather than thought or creativity.

Moreso than any recent big studio film, Jurassic World Rebirth reeks of the studio requirement.  At points it is possible to see the list of elements believed to be necessary for a Jurassic Park/World film. Dinosaurs, yes obviously, but also the remote island location, children and family members becoming stuck on the island for extra jeopardy, evil corporate villains willing to sacrifice anything for the wealth living dinosaurs could bring, dangerous flight among stalking predators through an empty laboratory … it’s even more of a complete recreation of the original than the first Jurassic World was.  Gone is any attempt to move the threat to a new milieu or come up with new ideas.  Over the last five years al of the dinosaurs roaming the wild at the end of the previous film have died from various environmental ailments, the survivors retreating to remote equatorial islands and jungles to live out their remaining days … including an island off the coast of French New Guinea which just happened to once host a secret Ingen dinosaur lab.

What comes from there doesn’t need much explaining because if you’ve seen any Jurassic Park film, you have seen Rebirth.  Director Gareth Edwards and writer David Koepp (returning to the franchise for the first time since The Lost World) are solid pros who approach the material in exactly that manner with fun, competent set pieces and no sense of danger or wonder whatsoever.   Moments here and there standout, particularly an all to brief flight through a swamp with a lit flare that feels like a lost element of Vittorio Storaro’s Apocalypse Now shots except with a giant dinosaur entering the frame.  Moments like that can’t really change things for Rebirth, nothing can, but they can give at least the idea that a human being is thinking about these things even if they are not in control of their own fate.

More even than the cargo cult replication, Rebirth feels like the filmmaking generated by AI that the industry has been worrying over for so many years now.  All of the ingredients of a Jurassic Park film have been fed into the computer and competent and soulless reproduction has come out, one incapable of holding new ideas, only of endlessly replicating what it has already been shown.  At this rate Hollywood does need to worry about AI doing this to the business, they will have already done it themselves.

4 out of 10

Starring Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend, Manuel-Garcia Rulfo, Luna Blaise, David Iacono and Audrina Miranda. Directed by Gareth Edwards.